Rooster Moans and The Land of the Rising Haibun - The Crow Star - combining haiku, prose, prose poetry

Rooster Moans image.

http://www.poetrycoop.com/poetry-workshops/land-rising-haibun-setting-japanese-poetry-forms-prose

Example of a haibun (prose with haiku)

The Crow Star

fading last note

a torresian crow calls out

a star-scarred sky

 now…

              so, so, so black    this black sky of stars more bright than I've ever seen

   some seem to shift and move    vibrate    to suggest something more

        last sighting on this travel of Jupiter above Venus

the southern cross

my woodsmoke embers

spiral upwards

quiet and dark    then a rustle reminds me of the Dreamtime Dingo

white and feral    imagination lends fear to a night that leers at me

woodfire

          flickering with light

the shadows of horses

it's cold now 3a.m. brittle cutting cold

the moon's no longer full

this brutal simplicity of a night

deep as a raven’s compassion

a susurrus of moths

around fire that flickers on

a thinning trail

to the stars

woodsmoke & embers

an early hours crow

I invoke another prayer

to its god and mine

I see a lightening from dark to metal grey       a quickening between trees

that becomes a hurt violet   into brush strokes   into morning

red-rimmed sunrise

     the trees rekindle fire

 through a blur of blue

Haibun by Alan Summers (this version March 2014)

Versions published:

Paper Wasp, Queensland, 1997; Azami haiku journal, Osaka, Japan 1998; Blithe Spirit Vol. 14 No. 2  June 2004; Haiku Hike project, June 2006 (Haiku Hike (World Walks) part of Crossover UK’s 2006 ‘Renewability’ project (2006); Shamrock Haiku Journal, Irish Haiku Society, Spring 2006; Sketchbook, eJournal  for Eastern & Western Short Forms Nov. 2007; RWP online version September 2009; Land of the Rising Haibun: Setting Japanese Poetry Forms in Prose, 2014: http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bb3dc7ead7e8fcce474c593af&id=be21868c01 

Anthology Credits: 

Journeys 2015, An Anthology of International Haibun 

ed. Angelee Deodhar ISBN 978-1515359876

http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/alan-summers-appears-in-new-haibun.html 

Shamrock Haiku Journal: 2007 - 2011 ed. Anatoly Kudryavitsky (December 2011 ISBN-10: 1470938308 ISBN-13: 978-1470938307

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1470938308/ref=sr_1_30?p=S00F&keywords=%22Alan+Summers%22&ie=UTF8&qid=1404730314 

all images©Alan Summers 2006-2014
except for the Rooster Moans title image.

Land of the Rising Haibun: Setting Japanese Poetry Forms in Prose

Robert Lowell said "almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of manoeuvring".

The joy of haibun and its sister form "tanka prose" - and perhaps the reason why they are catching the imagination of writers in English - is that they bring an extra opportunity to manoeuvre, juxtaposing the verse against the prose, creating new works that can even surprise ourselves.

Using excerpts, handouts, and examples of haibun, we will delve into the work of famous practitioners such as Matsuo Basho, and from outside Japan, poet/novelist Jack Kerouac and others.

The two prose/poetry forms we'll explore and write are:

Haibun: prose pieces in various styles from prose poetry to journalistic writing, travel writing, diary entries, long fiction through to flash fiction.  These prose narratives usually include one or more haiku inside the body of prose, or can start or conclude the body of prose.

Tanka Prose: a 21^st Century narrative, with roots in previous centuries, combining short five-line tanka poems that carry over a thousand years of history behind them. Tanka, grounded in concrete images infused with intimacy, and emotion tempered with implication, suggestion, and nuance, leap in and out of linear narrative with lateral, and dynamic, reverie.

We will cover the history of these two genres as well as concentrate on how to make them 21st narratives both in the haiku and tanka tradition, but also modern short stories and/or memories/memoirs, and literary non-fiction.

Teaching artist Alan Summers resides in Bradford on Avon and is a Japan Times award-winning writer with a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. He has studied and written haiku and other Japanese form poetry for twenty years.

He has won awards, been published internationally and translated into 15 languages. Alan helped his American team win Japan Times Best Renga of 2002. He’s a co-editor of five haiku anthologies: Parade of Life: Poems inspired by Japanese Prints; The Poetic Image - Haiku and Photography; Fifty-Seven Damn Good Haiku, Press Here; Four Virtual Haiku Poets; and c.2.2. Themes of Loss of Identity and/or Name. He has been General Secretary of the British Haiku Society and a Foundation Member of the Australian Haiku Society. Alan is currently editor with contemporary haiku magazine Bones, and is working on The Kigo Lab, a project to use the potential of Western haiku seasons for eco-critical writing.

Alan has a haiku pamphlet called The In-Between Season (2012), and a shortverse and contemporary haiku collection called Does Fish-God Know, (2012).

Course weblink:
http://www.poetrycoop.com/poetry-workshops/land-rising-haibun-setting-japanese-poetry-forms-prose

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